Greg Atkinson

I must say I enjoyed my first visit to the city of Tulsa, OK, though I didn’t get to see much of the city. I went from the airport to the EasyWorship offices, was in a meeting all day – left there and had a great dinner at the Cheesecake Factory with Jeff Taylor (owner and creator of EasyWorship), then headed back to the airport and flew home.

What’s the word? The word (unofficially – this is just Greg talking) is that EasyWorship is working on a new and improved cross-platform software. That’s right – can you say “EasyWorship for Mac”? Jeff has assembled a very gifted and talented team and they have been hard at work on a forthcoming version of EW that incorporates many new features based on comments and suggestions from their customers. The design is sharp and intuitive, the features are exciting and will better equip your church.

I’m especially excited about one feature, but am not at liberty to talk about it. I was blindfolded when I was led into their office and kept in a dark room all day. My cell phone (which has a camera) was taken from me and I was sworn to secrecy. Okay – I exaggerate, but I really can’t talk about what I saw.

I’m back to work at the church today, have a few meetings and our weekly rehearsal tonight. More later.

PERSONAL:
Just to update you all: I’m still extremely sore from riding that horse the other day. I used muscles that haven’t been used in years. It hurts to move!

Hello blog world. I’ve been away from my laptop the last several days. The end of last week I spent with friends from other churches that were in town for the C3 Conference. I gave several tours of Bent Tree and enjoyed meeting some of you for the first time. Thursday and Friday night I attended “C3 Nights” where I enjoyed great nights of worship and speaking from Brian Houston and TD Jakes.

Saturday I spent the day with friends from Christ Life Church in Tempe, AZ. We toured Bent Tree and also went to worship services at 3 different churches: Gateway, The Village and Deep Ellum Church. Sunday, they came with me to Bent Tree and got to see the behind-the-scenes of what happens on a Sunday.

After having lunch with them and saying “Goodbye”, I left with our Worship & Arts staff for our retreat in East Texas. We spent Sunday evening and Monday together as a staff – had a great time, played together, laughed together and even got to ride horses! (I’ll post a picture of me on a horse very soon) Below is a picture of our Worship & Arts staff at the retreat:


EXTRA:
Today EasyWorship is flying me to Tulsa, OK to visit the EasyWorship headquarters and preview some upcoming changes to EasyWorship. I look forward to seeing what they’ve been working on and offering feedback.

God has been softly speaking to my heart through one of my favorite songs: “Everlasting God” by Brenton Brown. I’ve been thinking about the opening lines: “Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord. We will wait upon the Lord. We will wait upon the Lord. STRENGTH WILL RISE as we wait upon the Lord…

Nothing profound or groundbreaking today, friends. Just sharing what’s on my heart this week.

EXTRA:
It’s been cool to meet church staff from other churches around the country that are in town for the C3 Conference. I love meeting new friends and giving them a tour of our church. I look forward to more of that today and tomorrow.

Many have asked what we’re doing as far as media in our new worship center. As I mentioned before, we are using EasyWorship as our presentation software. We are also slowly changing over our entire campus (all venues) to EasyWorship, which has a universal site license (other products such as MediaShout and ProPresenter charge extra to use their software on multiple computers). We have 7 venues that will be using EasyWorship, so the universal site license was a win for us.

My friends at EasyWorship were great during the crazy weeks and days leading up to our first worship service. Either we (Bent Tree) are the first church to use EasyWorship in an HD setting or we are one of the first – either way: we won’t be the last. I’ve heard rumors of confusion about whether or not EasyWorship can do HD. Let me set the record straight: it does and we’re doing it.

The trouble that we were having leading up to the first service was due to having the wrong video card. I went locally and purchased a new video card (NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS) and we were up and running in a matter of minutes. If you have any other questions about the initial setup of EasyWorship and the codecs I purchased/downloaded, just email me.

Here’s what’s up as far as the HD backgrounds we used. We’ve had 3 Sundays in our new worship center. The first Sunday we used all Igniter Backs Vol. 3 backgrounds (loops and stills). The next week we used more Igniter Backs and some brand new backgrounds from FortyOneTwenty. This past Sunday we used new HD backgrounds from SermonVideos.com.

I’d like to point out that I still encourage our volunteers that pick the backgrounds each week to use at least one still background for a song. As I’ve said before, motion backgrounds are most powerful in contrast to still backgrounds. You can read more on my philosophy of this in my “Less Is More” article.

EXTRA:
Still looking for FREE worship backgrounds? Check out HERE.

BONUS:
Yesterday we found our opening video to kick off our Easter service. It’s available at BlueFish.tv, it’s pretty sweet and it’s $1.99! Check it out HERE.

I know several people that are coming to Dallas this week for the C3 Conference at Fellowship Church. I’m planning to meet with a few of them and give them a tour of Bent Tree. If you’re coming to town this week and want to get together, just shoot me an email and let me know: greg@gregatkinson.com.

EXTRA:
We have a team of leaders from our church in Pune, India training Church leaders for our adopted people group, the Marathas. This past Sunday we spoke with one of our elders live during our Sunday morning worship service. It was about 9pm his time and it was morning for us. It was very cool. We could all hear him clear as a bell and he heard us with no problem. We did it using Skype!

EXTRA, EXTRA:

According to TechCrunch yesterday, a source close to Microsoft says the company will launch a new desktop software called WorldWide Telescope on February 27. Pretty cool. You can read more about it HERE.

BONUS:
I read this in WIRED magazine: You can place a picture of you and/or your family on the moon – that’s right: on the moon. Check out HERE for more info.

FYI – There has been some great discussion and comments on the frequency post, as well as the team leadership post. Go back and check them out. As far as the “Firing a Volunteer” post, I’ve been thinking about the whole refining of a team (this applies to any team at your church, not just the tech team).

I’ll probably turn this into a future article, but for now, here’s what I’m dealing with in my ministry. There are a couple of very talented and skilled people that say or imply things like “I want to do _____” or I don’t think I’m going to serve. Or “I’m going to do ______ or I quit.” – that type of thing. These aren’t people that I’m ready to “fire”. They definitely have some heart/attitude issues that need to be addressed, but the firing of the individual I mentioned last week was well beyond that.

As I’ve said before and will say again: ministry is people and people come in all shapes, sizes and personalities. Every church has them – the team members that you have to spend more time with than others, the ones that you have to have plenty of communication with, meetings with to discuss something they’ve said or done, extra coffees, breakfasts or lunches to get to know them better and allow them to get to know your heart better.

Thank God these people don’t make up the majority of your team (at least they don’t for me), but they do exist on each team. Though they can be frustrating and challenging, I do take a step back every now and then and see how God is using me and our technical ministry to shape and mold them into a person more like Christ. These difficult people are prime opportunities for growth and with the proper leadership will one day turn into model team members. I’ve seen it time and time again.

My number one request of myself, my staff, and my volunteers is that we are teachable. You don’t have to get it right every time, you don’t have to know it all – just be teachable. That’s all I’m looking for. I have a TON of grace for someone that’s teachable.

SIDEBAR:
Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.” A while back I was going to make that comment its own blog post. I can’t tell you how many times one of you has emailed me to ask a question and my response has been something like, “I honestly don’t know, but here’s someone who might…”. If you’ve ever heard that from me before, you know I’m telling the truth. If you don’t know something, just admit it and either give the task, question or project to someone that does or commit to learn it and let God stretch you.
SIDEBAR END

THE LESSON:
So – back to refining the team. Some things are constant, friends.

• You will always (and I mean always) need to be constantly recruiting and training new team members. Team members leave or step down all the time for various reasons. You must work hard and constantly to see that your team has depth – I can’t stress this enough.
• You will always need to keep attitudes in check. My boss calls it “keeping a short account”. If someone has an attitude on Sunday, we are meeting on Monday – it’s that simple. Don’t allow things to fester and go on without accountability.
• You will always need to be in communication with your team. Whether it be in person, phone calls, or emails – you should be touching base with your team regularly. Send them random thoughts, praises, dreams, goals, devotionals, stories of what God is doing at your church (often they don’t get to hear the stories that you do).
• You will always need to be growing personally, spiritually and professionally. You are their leader. They look to you for wisdom, discernment, guidance, vision and shepherding. You’ve got to stay on your knees (I’m talking to myself, too). You’ve got to stay in the Word (I’m really preaching to myself now). You’ve got to ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom and discernment, which God’s Word tells us He will give to those that ask (Proverbs 2:1-11 and James 1:5). You also should be reading. I encourage you to always be reading some type of book on leadership. If you can’t buy it, go to the Library and check one out.

Here’s what I’d love for you to comment on: What is one or some of your favorite books on leadership?

EXTRA:
If you haven’t heard, yet: Granger Community Church is going multi-campus. Check out Pastor Mark Beeson’s announcement HERE.

EXTRA, EXTRA:
For an update on my blog post “Blu-Ray It Is”, you can read the latest HERE.

BONUS:
To mi amigo, Mark, who requested more links to free stuff. I do still link to free media downloads as I come across them. I try to list the ones that people wouldn’t come across on their own. If you’re just looking for any free stuff, click on my “Blog Sponsors” tab above and go to each of the sponsors websites. Most of them have a monthly free download. HERE’S a FREE download you may not know of.

We have been meeting over the last 2 months to discuss this year’s Good Friday and Easter services. We are finalizing our plans soon and I’ll blog about them. What are you doing at your church this Easter season?

I don’t know what it’s like at your church, but at mine, we (my Audio Coordinator and myself) are constantly having to battle with frequency coordination throughout our campus. I’ve said from day one – I’ve never seen a church with so many wireless mics. Every classroom, every venue, you name it – it’s got wireless mics. This isn’t by choice – I inherited this.

Since our campus is under reconstruction, we had to move the children’s ministry from the Children’s Building over to the Education Building. When we did that, the kids’ ministry brought over their mics from their building, but they clashed with the existing mics in the E-building and canceled each other out. It has become a huge project to coordinate our campus (this involves my team, several different types of software, a scanner we just purchased, Clark ProMedia and a professional frequency coordinator from Florida who scanned our entire campus for all RF activity).

Across the street from us is a small church called Prestonwood (a church of over 20,000). People come to visit Bent Tree and everyone says, “Wow – Prestonwood is literally across the street.” Each time I say, “Yep, there it is.” We had to talk with their engineering team (yes, they have an Engineering Department) and coordinate our frequencies with each other. They had 3 professional RF guys on site when I called and were working on the same thing.
Yesterday, we learned that the 10 wireless mics we had set aside for our new kids’ theater won’t work after January ’09, due to the ongoing bidding of wireless bands. Are you guys keeping up with all this? It’s huge and the Church doesn’t even have a voice in the decision – it’s all about money and churches can’t compete with what these companies are bidding. My Audio Coordinator talked with Shure yesterday and their guy told him to not even bother with writing letters – money talks, plain and simple.

Take a look HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE for more info if this is news to you. If you are keeping up with this, I’d love to hear your thoughts, observations, plans, ideas, etc. When we ordered our new microphone package for our new worship center, I ordered a wired mic for every wireless mic. I wanted to make sure we could do everything we do – just in case. FYI – All of our new wireless mics in our new worship center are Shure UHF-Rs. How are you future-proofing your church?

A while back I wrote about forming my Tech Arts Leadership Team. I can not stress enough how crucial this team is to my ministry. I work extremely hard and am very strategic about making sure nothing relies on me alone. If I miss a Sunday, my team doesn’t miss a beat – everything will still go on like normal. Obviously, I love being there most weeks and love encouraging my team and seeing them in action, but I try to lead in such a way that all the volunteers take ownership.

Yesterday was an exception, as I had to run lights due to my previous post on “firing a volunteer”. I ran lights because that person was scheduled to run lights. The rest of the month is covered on lighting, so I’ll go back to being a cheerleader for my team. Every now and then I’ll video direct, but that is the exception rather than the rule.

In this crazy last couple of months leading up to the move into the new worship center, I relied heavily on my Tech Arts Leadership Team. I met with them about a month ago and shared the weight of pressure and responsibility with them. They dove in and rallied around me better than I could have ever dreamed. Each person is over a specific area of ministry. They each headed up their area and led out in organizing and overseeing training for their teams. Besides being the first team to serve on our first Sunday (last week), they each committed to stay on the remainder of the month to sit beside each person in their area as they serve for the first time on the new equipment.

Besides learning new equipment in a new room, we’ve had to grow overnight and assimilate new people onto our team. We went from 2 video cameras to 3, 1 stage manager to 3 and added the video engineer/shader position since our first Sunday in the new building – that’s 4 extra people needed each week to make Sunday happen. Thankfully, people are coming up to me and asking how to get plugged in last week and yesterday. Picture that! Yesterday everyone who served last week was sitting beside those that served this week. It was a beautiful sight and I was grateful to God.

Obviously, there is a lot of excitement and momentum with a new building and new equipment, but I also think it helps to have more of the team visible to the congregation. In our old worship center only Front of House audio was visible to the people. The lighting, graphics, and video team were hidden upstairs in the “tech booth”. Now there is a large Front of House booth in the middle of the worship center where lighting, our Service Director, Producer and Front of House audio team (A1 and A2) are. We also have 3 camera men up on platforms (a left, middle and right camera) that are seen in the house. FYI – Our graphics operator, video director and video shader are in a video control room, which is in a building behind the worship center. They have an “eye in the sky” camera that they look at on a big plasma monitor, so they can see what’s going on on the stage (note the control room picture in my next to last post).

Another thing I did was to order new tech team polo shirts. We did a whole new branding campaign when we moved into the new worship center, which changed our church’s logo. I waited until the first Sunday in the new building to utilize our new, black tech team polos, which feature our church’s new logo. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You wouldn’t believe what people will do for a free shirt. Our team looks sharp and people have taken notice. Below is what the logo looks like on the shirt:

Some have asked, so I’ll list these two groups out for you:

• The Technical Arts Leadership Team consists of: Myself, a person over audio, a person over lighting, 2 people over video (one over live video and one over video production), a systems person, a person over graphics and social events, a person over volunteers/assimilation and Service Directors and a person over stage managers. NOTE: Each team member plays a role in assimilation, as I match them up with newcomers to shadow and learn from. them
• What it takes to make Sunday happen: 4 audio engineers (A1 and A2 at FOH, a monitor engineer and a broadcast/recording engineer), 3 camera operators, a camera shader, Video Director, graphics operator, lighting operator, a Service Director (who executes and calls cues) and a Producer (who takes in the overall experience and offers artistic suggestions for creativity and different looks/feels each week). I simply float around and spend sometime in the video control room, some time at the FOH booth and sometime in the audience just taking it all in.

What does it take to make Sunday happen at your church?

This is a topic I’ve been thinking about blogging on for a while. Yesterday I had to ask one of my tech team members to step down and stop serving – so now this topic is fresh in my mind. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. In my 12 years as a church staff member I’ve had to ask others to step down before, but it doesn’t get any easier. It’s something that I felt God was leading me to, but it’s tough to not feel like “the bad guy”.

What it boils down to is protecting the spirit, health and unity of my tech team and seeing the need for someone to grow and have a change of heart and mind before they can serve in a healthy way (for them and for the whole team). You would think with all the excitement at my church surrounding the new worship center and renovations that all would be fine and dandy, but life happens. Ministry is people and sometimes as a leader, you have to make tough calls to properly minister to the individual, as well as be a good shepherd of the team as whole.

If you haven’t read it already, I encourage you to read “The Heart of the Artist” by Rory Noland – it’s a classic that I refer to and give out often. I’m going to give a copy to the tech team member and ask him to read it before he returns. I hope to meet with him and discuss the book in the future. How have you handled situations like this in your ministry? What steps did you have the person take before returning to serve?

PERSONAL:
The craziness of the church-wide renovation continues. I spent most of this week disassembling and storing equipment in our old worship center. I’m writing this after another 16 hour day on Thursday. Today (Friday) is rest day! If you’re interested, you can see more pictures from this past Sunday HERE.